Black.Calm

When I first went to my mother’s home town in South Carolina, not far from Monk’s Corner, one of my cousins rode up on us with a dirt bike and no shoes. It was probably about 50 years after this, and lets just say that the biggest difference between what I saw then and in this pic is probably pigment in the clothing.

darkjez:

blackhistoryalbum:

Home Sweet Home | 1936 on Flickr.

African American sharecropper family outside of their house, Scott, MS. Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. Life Photo Archives © Time Inc.

________

I’d like to highlight how recent that date is: 1936, people.

This is why when people are all like “OMFG SLAVERY WAS LIKE HUNDREDZ OF YRS AGO! WHY ARE BLACK PPL STILL WHINING ABOUT IT?!” my blood actually boils. What people do not want to undertand is that after emancipation most blacks were immediately reconscripted into a new form of enslavement where they were tied to plantations (often the same plantations they or their recent ancestors worked as slaves) as “sharecroppers” (i.e. peonage wage labor). Former slaves were kept in perpetual debt by white land owners who charged exorbitant interest rates on monetary loans (for seeds/farm equipment etc.) & claimed large portions of black farmers’ crops as a fee for the use of their land. So basically the master/slave relationships was reinscribed & blacks remained tied to the land. 

(via santhonythomas)